Abstract: Real-time Transfer Protocol (RTP) is used by nearly all Voice-over-IP systems to provide the audio channel for calls. As such, it provides ample opportunity for the creation of a covert communication channel due to its very nature. While use of steganographic techniques with various audio cover-medium has been extensively researched, most applications of such have been limited to audio cover-medium of a static nature such as WAV or MP3 file audio data. This paper details a common technique for the use of steganography with audio data cover-medium, outlines the problem issues that arise when attempting to use such techniques to establish a full-duplex communications channel within audio data transmitted via an unreliable streaming protocol, and documents solutions to these problems. An implementation of the ideas discussed entitled SteganRTP is included in the reference materials.

A recording of the presentation given at DefCon is also available.

Real-time Steganography with RTP

In this paper, we present a model of a trust-based recommendation system on a social network. The idea of the model is that agents use their social network to reach information and their trust relationships to filter it.

We investigate how the dynamics of trust among agents affect the performance of the system by comparing it to a frequency-based recommendation system. Furthermore, we identify the impact of network density, preference heterogeneity among agents, and knowledge sparseness to be crucial factors for the performance of the system.

The system self-organises in a state with performance near to the optimum; the performance on the global level is an emergent property of the system, achieved without explicit coordination from the local interactions of agents.

A Model of a Trust-based Recommendation System on a Social Network

Apple's Mac OS X operating system is attracting more attention from users and security researchers alike. Despite this increased interest, there is still an apparent lack of detailed vulnerability development information for OS X. This paper will attempt to help bridge this gap by walking through the entire vulnerability development process. This process starts with vulnerability discovery and ultimately finished with a remote code execution. To help illustrate this process, a real vulnerability found in the OS X wireless device driver is used.

OS X Kernel-mode Exploitation in a Weekend

A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software.

reBlog by Eyebeam R&D

Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In a nutshell, SuprGlu:

* gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place.
* presents your content with simple, great looking templates which you can customize.
* is FREE to use!

SuprGlu - Gluing your life together.

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

The Rise of 'Worse is Better'

Alan Kay says:

"Rich Gold was one of the most creative and unusual minds of our era. His unique vision lives on in this book."

John Seely Brown says:

"This is a gem that will shape your way of seeing and thinking about the world forever. Rich was one of the true visionaries of Xerox PARC and this unique book, in both its form and content, provides a window into a brilliant and incredibility imaginative mind at work."

Publishers Weekly review:

The Plenitude is the word of Silicon Valley polymath Gold for the limitless stuff produced to feed our consumer-focused economy, but this small, posthumous (Gold died in 2003) book reads more like his private notebook than a business guide. That's not a bad thing: Gold, a scientist, inventor and artist who worked at times for the toy company Mattel and the legendary Xerox PARC research labs, is good company. Based on a few of his lectures, this breezy book shares thoughts on creative hats Gold has worn, such as artist and engineer, and the worldviews they impose on practitioners (e.g., engineers like to solve problems while designers are contemptuous of artists for their detachment from the commercial). The later part of the book weighs consumerism's pros and cons, coming out in favor—where else could an inventor fall?—while offering valid critiques (e.g., so much of what we make and buy is ugly). Throughout, Gold displays casual insights—such as illustrating the sheer abundance of the plenitude by pointing out the variety of shirts in an audience and the work that went into each—and pads this very skinny book with his own goofy cartoons. The result is a fun splash in some of the important ideas behind modern consumption.

MIT Press has the table of contents and sample chapters here. The book was reviewed last month in the LA Times:

This little book, with its simple logic and language and unforgettable, whimsical drawings, will change the way its readers look at the world around them.

The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff

The crisis that has the greatest potential to undermine what the craft of journalism does best is a quiet one that rarely draws the big headlines: the crisis of paper. Paper’s long career as a medium of human communication, and in particular as a purveyor of news, may be ending.

Paper is an increasingly subordinate medium. Like a brain-dead patient on life support, it lives because other technologies allow it to live. The only question, it seems, is when we will put paper out of its misery.

It just sits there, mute and passive, like a dog that knows one trick, waiting to perform it again.

The pertinent question may be not whether the old medium will survive, but whether the new ones will ever escape paper’s enormous shadow.

In a time of distractibility, a paper also keeps you focused.

What if paper somehow influences or shapes the information that newspapers and other paper media produce? It’s a strange idea, one that requires us to imagine paper not just as a container of content, but part of the content itself.

In Baghdad in the year 1226, there were more than one hundred papermakers and booksellers operating on a single street.

Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal

Over my many years at Salon — in my role as the geekiest of our editorial management team — I found myself often being asked whether some particular problem we were having with our site or our email system or something else might be the result of “hackers.”

Most of the time, I spared my inquisitors the lecture on the history and proper use of that term. Except in a tiny number of cases where there was specific evidence suggesting at least the possibility of some sort of foul play, I’d simply remind everyone how many different things could go wrong on any digital network, argue that the odds favored the likelihood of some sort of malfunction rather than malfeasance, and suggest that everyone should relax (except for our sysadmins, of course, who were busy trying to diagnose the problem).

The author of Dreaming In Code comments on John Schwartz's recent NYT article.

I note in passing that an EE Times article in 2004, Experts worry that synthetic biology may spawn biohackers, didn't generate the same kind of reaction.

Nothing to fear but complexity itself

David Beckett, a former academic who is now a principal software engineer at Yahoo, said: “Web to me means that it doesn’t come from one place. It’s distributed, but you can connect it up.” Yahoo’s data, he added, was collected from many sources, and many parts tend to work independently in their own “silos.”

Kathleen Hondru, a vice president for marketing at Innovative Systems in Pittsburgh, calls the company's process “data quality management.”

From the article linked above:

Kathleen Hondru says business is up thanks to government regulations that require industries to track massive amounts of data.

(I noticed that the author of the NYT article, Peter Wayner, in a March 2007 article for InfoWorld, also quotes Hondru and describes her company's product.)

Helping Computers to Search With Nuance, Like Us